Many entities, including those that conduct business over the Internet, find it beneficial to conduct surveys to determine what products should be offered, what services should be made available, what content should be present on a website, and so forth. Such surveys may be presented to a user after a transaction, such as the purchase of a product. Alternatively, the survey may be presented to a user independent of any particular transaction. Existing survey systems use a variety of delivery mechanisms including email invitations, banner adds, popup windows, and links on websites. The layout and presentation of the survey questions may be customized by the author of the survey to the extent allowable by the electronic survey system.
Typical survey systems allow the survey participant to respond via email, website, web application, web applet, or a client specifically designed to accept, transmit, or store the responses. The responses may take on a variety of forms including, but not limited to, single choice, multiple choice, rating scale, and text responses. Electronic survey systems typically gather the responses in a database or other electronic storage mechanism. The response data often becomes the subject matter for various reports, graphs, charts, and analysis. The reporting analysis tools are often separate from the actual survey systems themselves.
Various survey systems are presently available that allow electronic surveys to be authored and transmitted over the Internet. The existing systems use a variety of participation models. Some of the systems use an invitation-based system, in which an invitation is sent to the participant via email or other form of electronic message. The email invitations may or may not contain information to identify the person invited to the survey. Some systems use an open model that allows any visitor to a website to follow a link and respond to an electronic survey without ever identifying himself. There is also a self-registration model, where the participants identify themselves during a registration process before taking the survey.
There are several challenges associated with the use of surveys to gather information. It has been established that response rates to surveys typically decline as the amount of time required to respond increases. If the survey is too long or time-consuming, the user may not complete the survey. At the same time, the number of respondents is often a critical factor in the accuracy of a survey. The survey may not be effective if too few questions are asked of the user. Further, the questions and answer choices are predetermined by the author prior to the survey being made available for participants to respond. Thus, additional ideas of the user may not be captured.
Various efforts have been made to address these challenges. For example, to minimize the number of questions asked, some presently available electronic survey systems enable the author of the survey to specify the presentation order and skip certain survey questions based on the answers to previous questions. But even in such systems, the author of the survey writes all of the questions and answer choices.
Another way to reduce the length of the survey is to show the participant only a subset of the entire list of possible questions. There is one known company who offers the ability to show a participant a subset of the entire list. Informative, Inc. (Brisbane, Calif.) offers a product that allows a participant to select a subset of items from a larger list (that is a subset of all available items), and then arrange the subset into order according to the participant's preference.
Such systems are based on the premise that items that are receiving high rankings from respondents should be presented more often than items that are receiving low rankings. These systems consider a data collection effort to be either mature or immature, depending on the number of responses. This maturity status applies to the entire set of items. When the data collection effort is in the immature state, the items are presented to the respondents at random. When a sufficient number of responses is collected and the data collection is considered mature, the selection process shifts to selecting items with higher rankings to present to subsequent respondents. While this may be appropriate in some instances, it is limited in applicability and does not consider some other important factors that can be used to select a sample.
Some electronic survey systems have attempted to gather new items from a population of participants by enabling the participant to enter a text answer. However, to enable rapid processing of the survey results, such questions are typically limited in number, which places an artificial limitation on the number of items any one participant can submit. Furthermore, the items that are input are often deposited in a database with little information about the importance of the items.
Thus, there remains a need for a process for ranking items, people, or any other items in a manner that encourages participation and achieves high response rates. There further remains a need for a system that is able to collect items from the user and incorporate such items such that the new items are available for ranking by other participants.